DIANNE BUT­LER OUT OF THE BOX

ILOVE it when the bear just stands there in the wa­ter with his mouth open and the fish leaps into it. Stupid fish. Alec Bald­win’s kinda beary. Yeah, like he’d en­joy a fish din­ner but also big and dan­ger­ous and you’d say prob­a­bly furry un­der those suits. Some­times on 30 Rock when he kicks his voice into an­other gear he can sound very shad­owy. He’s not us­ing that voice tonight though. He’s got his im­por­tant Nat Geo voice on but it’s also in awe.

The voice is aided and abet­ted by the very cru­cial script, which is full of weight, it’s like Gore Vi­dal wrote it, if Gore Vi­dal was bu­limic and had eaten a th­e­saurus for din­ner and then vom­ited it up again five min­utes later. Gore Vi­dal’s a bad ex­am­ple. I love Gore Vi­dal. I think I meant to say Al Gore.

Life on Earth is hard, Alec Bald­win says at the start of Great Mi­gra­tions. Maybe I was wrong and this is the 30 Rock Repub­li­can Jack Don­aghy Alec Bald­win af­ter all. It’s a tire­less drama, Jack/Alec says, and the mu­sic tells us he’s right. I hope you’re feel­ing up to a crocodile at­tack. What on earth could drive this head­long rush to slaugh­ter, he asks, and it turns out it’s not rhetor­i­cal, be­cause he comes back with this: ‘‘ Only Earth her­self. With her in­sis­tent clocks.’’

They al­ways make the chee- tahs look bad. There are 200,000 ze­bra and more than a mil­lion wilde­beest wan­der­ing around Tan­za­nia and Kenya and half of them have just given birth and as far as I can see there’s about one chee­tah with one adorable lit­tle kit­ten and surely they’re not go­ing to even no­tice if one of those an­i­mals is missing.

I was keen to see what an­gle they might take with Christ­mas Is­land, could be a va­ri­ety of op­tions here ob­vi­ously, but it’s all about red crabs — the size of din­ner plates, Alec Bald­win says, in a tone that maybe sug­gests he wishes they were on one as well. Shame about those yel­low crazy ants — ‘‘ aliens ac­ci­den­tally in­tro­duced by cargo ships’’ ... I thought, here we go, he’s go­ing to start talk­ing about il­le­gal de­ten­tion. But no.